Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/97

Rh flexibility for this exaltation and praise. Vast and magnificent it must have been, and very beautiful, as it came from tribal throats. A greater triumph it was for the Chinook jargon than for Christian doctrine, considering that, as at the 1839 camp meeting at The Dalles, the Indians sometimes naively proposed that they ought to be paid for their excellent demonstrations of worship.

With more sincerity, an Indian girl used it for a death wail—a song of hope and immortality, with its beautiful refrain of Tamala, tamala—tomorrow and tomorrow. The last words of a Yakima chief were uttered in this tongue. When we read the dying expression of Stonewall Jackson—"Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees"—we realize what a beautiful language English is, when kept beautiful in its simplicity. So when Chief Qualchien in a quarter of an hour's time faced dark extinction, he cried out in Chinook jargon a plea that reverberated in the recollection of an American soldier all his life as having the profoundest pathos of any sounds he ever heard. From its initial utilization as the parlance of barter to such uses as these, how far had the language advanced.

It was such a language that Myron Eells could say of it that for eighteen years he had "talked in it, sung in it, prayed and preached in it, translated considerable into it and thought in it…."

Thought in it! For a white man it had become a vehicle of thought. To the lips of the Indian it came spontaneously to express his deepest feelings. Though the vocabulary was derived from many sources, the